software
Internet Arcade: Venture
Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy.
The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the "Hallmonsters", according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as "Evil Otto" in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score.
The goal of each room is only to steal the room's treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in "The Two-Headed Room", two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize.
Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game's AI allows them to dodge the player's shots with varying degrees of "intelligence" (for example, the snakes of "The Serpent Room" are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of "The Troll Room" are quite adept at evasion).
The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
Identifier arcade_ventureCreator ExidyDate 1981Emulator ventureEmulator_ext zipMediatype softwareScanner Internet Archive Python library 0.7.0Publicdate 2014-08-07 18:57:34Addeddate 2014-08-07 18:57:34Year 1981Genre Maze / Shooter SmallCpu M6502Emulator_keybd arcadeBackup_location ia905901_31
Reviewer:
Leonel_VHS -
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
September 9, 2016
Subject:
One of my faves!
LOVE this game. Thanks for sharing it!!
Reviewer:
GoodNewsJimDotCom -
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
November 14, 2014
Subject:
I had this game in my arcade when I was in kindergarten
I count my blessings every day, and it seems like I'm blessed well more than most. Back in the early 80s, my family had an arcade and a little grocery store. This game was there. It looks like the precursor to Gauntlet and Zelda. This game was really fun for its time, and we spent lots of quarters on it.
*This game is fair* You can get all the treasures on one life. Back in the early 80s arcade games could be fair by definition of letting you be able to win on one credit/ Late 80s early 90s were the death of the arcades in part that video games became "quarter eaters" that weren't fair and more than one quarter to play. Why put your quarters in a game that's not fair? The triple problem of "quarter eating","over 25c games" and home systems being better, meant the death of arcades.
For its time, there was nothing as cool as this, and it held itself as a playable game you'd want to play up to about 1985 or the dawn of NES.